Invite All Users to a Slack Channel
Quick and easy way to add all your team members to a new Slack channel
If you have ever tried to create a new channel in Slack with all the users included in the team, you know how cumbersome it could get. When I searched for the problem initially, I came across four possible ways to do it.
If you are looking for the best solution, see Channel Tools
Alternative Solutions
1. Do it manually
This is a good solution if there are fewer than 100 members in your Slack channel. Go to the #general channel (Slack adds all invited users to this channel by default). Enter /who, this gives a list of first 100 users in the channel.
Copy all the names, and then go to the destination channel where you want to add them. Paste the list of user names that you copied in the previous step, and press Enter. Slack will ask you to invite the members that are already not in the channel. Select Invite them, Done!
While this method is good for simple scenarios, but you would run into issues, if there are guest users or members restricted to one or a few channels. Another issue is that it creates a public message in Slack with the list of users, that may or may not be desirable.
2. Use Slack API
If you are a developer, you can try this method by using Slack API. You can use the following gist. It uses JavaScript to call slack API. You’ll need to have a bot token, which you can get by creating a slack app.
https://gist.github.com/norganna/12686901c0d802ed112d911ee24bc68c
3. Chrome Extension
I found references to a chrome extension that automated the process using a browser script, but that doesn’t seem to be working anymore.
https://slack-invite-all.com — [sorry, it doesn’t work]
Best Solution — Invite all users to a Slack channel
Channel Tools
While the solutions presented above are limited to the number of users that could be invited, require a lot of manual work, or need an understanding of code. For a typical admin taking care of hundreds or thousands of users, this could be a big blocker.
Using Channel Tools, you can invite all users to a Slack channel, in a matter of a few minutes.
How to add all members to a Slack channel?
- Install Channel Tools
Go to https://www.channeltools.io, and click onAdd to Slack. It asks you for the required permissions for channel invites to work.
2. Add Channel Tools to the source channel— With Channel Tools, you can invite all users from any channel to a channel of your choice in Slack. In this case, we want to invite all users. Slack adds all users to the #general channel by default. So, let’s add Channel Tools there first. Go to #general and type:
/invite @Channel Tools
3. Add to destination channel — Similarly, go the channel where you want to invite these users and type the above command again.
4. Add users — Now that all the setup is done, you can come to the main task. In the destination channel, type /invite_channel #general Before starting with the process, it would confirm the details with you. Within a few seconds (this could be more depending on the number of users you want to invite), you should be done.
In case a user was restricted, or any other issue. Channel Tools will inform you exactly what happened.
And, that’s it!
